Labouring Lives: Work and Workers in Nineteenth-Century Ontario

For twenty years, labour and working-class history has emphasized the struggle for workplace control between skilled craftsmen and factory owners in Ontario's major industrial cities. This preoccupation not only has left the great majority of the province's working people in the shadows of history, but has isolated labour history from such other 'new histories' as women's history, ethnic history, and the history of mobility. This collaborative volume argues for a more nuanced account of the diversity of working people's experience in the nineteenth century. It presents detailed studies of a broad range of occupations and institutions that figured prominently in workers' lives. These include the more common jobs - farm labour, housework, lumbering - and the more pervasive institutions - the church, the law, the family - as well as new accounts of industrial labour in small-town factories and on the railways. The themes explored include class formation, the nature and meaning of work, labour relations, and the character of economic and social change in nineteenth-century Ontario. --Publisher's description. Contents: Introduction / Paul Craven (pages 3-12) -- Rural labour / Terry Crowley (pages 13-104) -- Labour and the law / Jeremy Webber (pages 105-203) -- The Shantymen / Ian Radforth (pages 204-277) -- Religion, leisure, and working-class identity / Lynne Marks (pages 278-334) -- Labour and management on the Great Western Railway / Paul Craven (pages 335-411) -- The home as workplace / Bettina Bradbury (pages 412-478) -- Factory workers (pages 479-589) - Picture credits (page 595) -- Index (pages 597-622).

OCLC: 299468989